The afternoon light in Lisbon has that particular golden quality the kind that makes terracotta rooftops glow and casts long shadows across tiled façades. You're seated on a rooftop terrace, a glass of vinho verde sweating in the heat beside you. And you're doing what most of us do: scrolling through your camera roll.
Three hundred photos from this trip alone. Blurry shots of pastéis de nata. Seven nearly identical angles of the same azulejo wall. A dozen attempts to capture the view you're looking at right now. They all blur together. In a month, you'll struggle to remember which day was which.
There's a quiet irony in modern travel. We've never had more ways to document our experiences, yet we often return home with thousands of images and surprisingly few actual memories. The camera creates distance. The phone becomes a barrier between us and the moment we're trying to preserve.
But there's another way.
Imagine sitting in that same spot, but instead of scrolling, you're holding a small brush. A compact palette of watercolors rests beside your drink. For the next twenty minutes, you're not capturing this scene you're studying it. The way afternoon sun catches the yellow trim of a distant window. The precise shade of terracotta that shifts from warm orange to dusty pink. The crooked angle of a rooftop antenna that your camera would never notice, but your brush will remember.
This is watercolor sketching as a travel practice. Not a hobby for artists. A ritual for anyone who wants to actually be where they are.
We tend to think of luxury in terms of thread counts and tasting menus. But for the seasoned traveler someone who has done the grand hotels and the private tours the real scarcity isn't access. It's attention.
Time moves differently when you paint. There's no notification pulling you away. No algorithm deciding what you should look at next. Just you, the scene in front of you, and the quiet problem of how to mix the right shade of blue for that strip of ocean on the horizon.
Watercolor sketching functions as a kind of moving meditation. Your mind stops rehearsing tomorrow's itinerary. You stop wondering if you should check your email. The café noise fades into pleasant background texture. What remains is this: the weight of the brush, the way pigment bleeds into wet paper, the view that slowly takes shape under your hand.
Consider the difference. You visit a café in Buenos Aires. You take a photo of your cortado, maybe the pressed tin ceiling if the light is good. You check your phone while you drink. Twenty minutes later, you leave. The café joins the blur.
Or: you visit the same café. You order the same cortado. But instead of reaching for your phone, you pull out a small sketchbook. You spend fifteen minutes painting the view from your table—the zinc counter, the row of bottles catching light, the waiter's white jacket. When you leave, you don't just remember the café. You remember the temperature of the air, the song that was playing, the sound of the espresso machine. The act of painting anchored you there.
This is what slow travel actually means. Not moving less. Seeing more.
Something interesting happens when you sit down to sketch in public: you become visible.
Not in the way of a tourist with a camera, quickly snapping and moving on. When you settle into a spot with a sketchbook, you signal that you're staying. You're paying attention. And people notice.
A fisherman in a harbor town pauses to see what you're painting. A grandmother on a park bench leans over, curious. A café owner brings you a second coffee, unprompted, because you've been sitting there for an hour and clearly you're doing something interesting. These small interactions impossible to plan, easy to miss if you're rushing—become the texture of a trip.
Sketching also trains your eye to see what's actually there, not what you expected to find. You notice the hand-painted shop signs, faded but beautiful. The particular way laundry hangs from balconies in this neighborhood versus the one across the river. The geometry of market stalls, the colors vendors choose to display their goods. Details that cameras flatten but brushes somehow preserve.
A few gentle considerations make the practice more rewarding. Be thoughtful about where you set up not blocking foot traffic, not intruding on someone's private moment. If you want to sketch a person up close, a smile and a gesture of permission goes a long way. Most people are flattered. Some will want to see the result. These become the interactions you'll talk about for years.
The setting doesn't matter as much as the intention. A covered souk at midday. A seaside promenade at dusk. A desert camp under morning light. Wherever you find yourself, there's a scene worth sitting with.
One of the quiet pleasures of this practice is how little you need.
Forget the image of the artist hauling an easel and canvas. Travel watercolor sketching is built for constraint. Everything fits in a corner of your daypack, ready to pull out whenever a moment calls for it.
The essentials: a small sketchbook (A5 or smaller works beautifully), a compact watercolor palette, one or two water brushes that hold water in the handle, a pencil for light outlines, and perhaps a small cloth for dabbing excess water. That's it. A good travel watercolor kit weighs less than a paperback novel and takes up roughly the same space.
For travelers who prefer a ready-made solution, compact all-in-one sets like this travel watercolor kit bundle paints, brushes and paper in a single package, so you can turn any café table into a tiny studio.
The portability is the point. This isn't about creating masterpieces. It's about having the tools available when the moment is right on a train winding through mountains, in an airport lounge during a long layover, on a hotel balcony before dinner. The sketchbook goes where you go. And because it's always with you, you're always ready to stop, look, and stay a while.
A small tip: pack your watercolor kit in an outside pocket. The moment you have to dig through your bag to find it, the friction increases. Keep it accessible, and you'll use it more.
The secret to making this stick isn't talent or discipline. It's ritual.
Build the practice into moments that already exist in your travel rhythm. The easiest: a morning sketch with your first coffee. While the city wakes up, while the light is soft and the streets are quiet, spend fifteen minutes painting the view from your balcony or breakfast table. This becomes a kind of visual journaling a record not just of what you saw, but of how the day began.
Another approach: the arrival and departure sketch. On your first evening in a new place, paint the view from your room. On your last morning, paint the same view. The two sketches become bookends a record of how your perception shifted over the time you spent there.
Weather sketches offer unexpected rewards. That sudden rainstorm that kept you under an awning? That's a painting. The fog that rolled in and softened the harbor? That too. Conditions that photographers curse become opportunities for painters. The "imperfect" moment becomes the memorable one.
Transit time, usually dead time, transforms as well. A train window offers a constantly shifting canvas. Pull out your travel watercolor kit and suddenly that three-hour journey becomes productive. Even an airport lounge that fluorescent purgatory we all know too well contains small scenes worth capturing: the play of light on departure screens, the geometry of waiting passengers, the view of the tarmac at dusk.
Here's what matters: none of this requires skill. A wobbly line, an accidental smudge, a color that didn't quite match these aren't failures. They're evidence that a human hand made this, in a specific place, at a specific time. Perfection is for photographs. Character is for sketchbooks.
Over time, something accumulates.
Flip through a sketchbook from a year ago and the memories surface differently than scrolling through a camera roll. There's the page where you spilled coffee on wet paint and decided to just let it dry that way. There's the sketch you made while waiting for a delayed ferry, where the frustration of the moment somehow became a moody, beautiful scene. There's the page a stranger signed after watching you paint their neighborhood.
Each sketch carries its context. The sounds of that afternoon. The taste of what you were drinking. The conversation you had with the person at the next table. Photos capture what things looked like. Paintings capture what they felt like.
After a decade of travel, you might have 50,000 digital images, most of them never viewed again, stored on a hard drive somewhere. Or you might have a small stack of sketchbooks worn, paint-stained, imperfect each one a portal to a different version of yourself in a different part of the world.
This is the real luxury. Not the suite with the view, but the memory that lasts. Not the experience purchased, but the one earned through patience and attention.
Your next trip is coming. Pack lighter. Bring brushes. See what you've been missing.
